Today I came across a video ot Chef Jamie Oliver’s visit to a grade one classroom in the States (which you can see here). Students were surprisingly unable to identify basic vegetables and fruit, with one child guessing that tomatoes were potatoes.
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Recently I came across the work of Zoe Weil, author, educator, and Co-Founder of the Institute for Humane Education.
For nearly 30 years, Weil has been a Humane Educator (integrating human rights, environmental preservation, and animal protection in her teaching). She defines Solutionary quite simply, as someone who combines their talents and skills to solve a problem they care about. Here are three reflective questions she poses to young people (which I think are great for reflecting in high school, college/uni, and beyond!):
If children have interest, then education happens. At a recent conference in New York, I spent a week exploring alternative education from an American perspective (a lot of talk about homeschooling, unschooling, “deschooling”, which I will come back to in a later post). A refreshing departure was a keynote speech by Sugata Mitra; he was the first at the conference to focus on ACCESS for students who don’t have the choice of any school at all!
Mitra is the man behind the “hole in the wall” experiments, and has gained popularity through TED Talks (such as this one, and this one). Essentially, Mitra placed a computer in the wall of a slum in New Delhi in 1999, where kids had never used a computer before. With an internet connection, Mitra left the computer for kids to play with. What he found was that groups of kids, within days, were able to learn impressive things on their own - from browsing to recording music, to googling their homework! The following reflection was contributed by Jerry Liu, one of the Laurier Enactus students who took part in our service learning trip to Haiti. As their Faculty Advisor, I am happy and humbled to share their thoughts with you. We are also grateful to Steve Sider (check out his blog here), for inviting us to be part of this experience. After working remotely with a Haitian NGO on their micro-finance program since October, I had the opportunity to travel to Cap-Haitien to work with the team on the ground. It was a great opportunity for us to apply the skills we learned in university, while having a deep learning experience in the Haitian context.
Our team managed to strike a balance between digging deep into the culture and economy in Cap-Haitien, and synthesizing these into specific insights for the NGO. Most notably, while coming up with business ideas for the micro-finance program, we toured the nearby market, and realized that most vendors were selling either products purchased in bulk at the Dominican border, or donated clothes from the United States. The following reflection was contributed by Laura Douglas, one of the Laurier Enactus students who took part in our service learning trip to Haiti. As their Faculty Advisor, I am happy and humbled in sharing their thoughts with you. We are also grateful to Steve Sider (check out his blog here), for inviting us to be part of this experience. Stay tuned for Jerry Liu's reflection, coming tomorrow! After finishing the first week of my final semester at Laurier, my prepared personality had me completing a checklist before I jumped on a plane to Haiti. However, no matter how prepared I was, or thought I could be, I very quickly learned there as very little I could have done to ensure I could make the most my service learning trip. Reflecting back on such a powerful experience I was able to see the very apparent motives, meaning and memories that arose from learning outside of the classroom.
As part of this year’s service learning trip to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, the Laurier ENACTUS team (an organization based on applying business skills to address social needs) has been spending time at a partnering nutrition centre. The nutrition centre is a hub for many services and programs, with an aim to develop the capacity and skills of young mothers in the long term, while addressing nutritional deficiencies in their babies in the short term.
Over the past year, our small team (three Laurier Business students and one faculty member) has spent time researching improvements to an existing microfinance program at the centre. In just a few days of being here in Cap, we are really appreciating the critical importance of presence on the ground to really LISTEN to the concerns and needs of people we are working with, and to understand broader context. Skype calls don’t always do this justice!! So we decided to take a step back, and put our research on microfinance aside.. just for now! Recently, civil rights issues in the states and here in Canada have caused me to think a lot about empathy. Why is it that some people seem to express and feel empathy more easily than others? Why do we tend to jump to a defensive stance during challenging conversations? Most importantly, what does this have to do with schooling?! For this last question, I turn to my favourite escape, a quote by a respected person: Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. Recently entrepreneur and researcher Vivek Wadhwa posted an insightful piece on Reinventing the Classroom for the digital age. He talks about the potential for a revolution in education: I am talking about a complete transformation of the way teaching is done, with the computer taking the role of the lecturer, the teacher becoming a coach, and students taking responsibility for their own learning. As the post-secondary school year winds down here in Canada, this post is dedicated to grads, past and present.
Here are five qualities to live by, and some life lessons from a few inspiring personalities. (Also, watch Ellen Degeneres' commencement speech at Tulane - you will enjoy every minute!): Why do we still view collaboration as 'cheating'? A UCLA Prof's experiment in game theory.2/28/2015 Recently an article was being shared in education and social media circles called “Why I let my students cheat on an exam”, by UCLA Behavioral Ecology professor Peter Nonacs.
This prof cleverly decided to allow students to live the concepts of animal behaviour and game theory by working through tough problems TOGETHER, in a real-life game theory situation, rather than by memorizing and (superficially) applying key concepts. He explains: |
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